Noah Fields Drake returned to Fayetteville late in the summer of 1912, bringing his wife, Mary, and two young daughters, Doris and Vera. A native of Summers, 20 miles to the west, he had attended Arkansas Industrial University as an undergraduate in the late 1880s.
Drake always traveled home to Summers on foot. Vera Drake Wade recalled in a family history that "all this walking prepared him for his geological work ... in later years for he almost always walked, seldom using a horse or buggy."
The Drakes rented or bought a house on Highland Avenue in the hilltop area south of Wilson Park now known as the Rock House Historic District. Drake would build 11 of the rock houses that contribute to the district's historic designation. The Noah Fields Drake Collection contains the plan for the garden surrounding the flagship four-story bungalow that Drake built for himself.
The plan contains grapevines and persimmon, plum, peach, nectarine, jujube, and cherry trees, as well as filbert (hazelnut), hickory, chestnut, Persian walnut, and black walnut trees. When Tom Shiras (the "Walking Editor of the Ozarks") visited Drake in 1938 for an interview, he described his yard as "a veritable botanical garden" kept looking like "the estate of an Oriental potentate."
Within a year of Drake's return to Fayetteville, he had acquired a 72-acre farm north of town and was writing far and away for information about nut culture. He became interested in growing walnuts during his years in China. The Persian Walnut grew well in and near Tientsin, which was only slightly colder than Arkansas' Washington County. On Feb. 27, 1914, Drake thanked E.K. Lowry of Tientsin for sending him a box of Shansi walnuts.
By late October 1916, Drake was corresponding with F.W. Walgamot, a walnut grower of Portland, Ore., thanking him for answering questions and sharing information to help him with his "proposed walnut orchard." Drake had about two dozen seedlings grown from seed obtained from China, and was planning to graft and bud them onto native black walnut.
In the mid-1910s, Drake was also ordering plants and information from the United States Department of Agriculture, and corresponding with C.A. Read, whose job title was Head of Nut Culture Investigation.
By late November 1918, Drake could report to the USDA that he had "about 100 trees, mostly Franquette [a variety of black walnut] from Oregon and California and about 25 trees from seed from China. Some of the latter are now two and three years old while the former were planted last spring."
Within 10 years of Drake's entry into nut culture, people all over the country who wanted to grow walnuts were seeking information and specimens from him. (In part, this was because he placed notices and published articles in the American Nut Journal and the National Nut News.)
Though the primary purpose of Drake's orchard was experimental, not commercial, by 1928 he was in touch with commercial nut brokers in Chicago. Plessing Habicht wrote Drake on Feb. 16, 1928, that during the season his nuthouse was "in contact with some hundred little sellers of Black Walnut Kernels," located all over Appalachia.
Habicht found commercial cracking impractical, unable to compete with "home industry ... an activity which has developed in the Appalachian Mountain district largely under the incentive of Christmas money becoming available to women and children during November and December."
Crackers from all over the country shipped 10 pounds to lots of several barrels, with an average shipment of about 50 pounds, he wrote to Drake. In "Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South," Grady McWhiney writes that "cracker" as a derogatory term for poor, uneducated, white people comes from the Gaelic term "craig," meaning "to brag." Reading the following from Habicht to Drake made me wonder if McWhiney might be wrong:
"You will understand that the majority of the cracking is done by families in rather backward districts [of Appalachia], in part by a population which is still more or less illiterate."
On Oct. 31, 1929, the superintendent of the California Almond Growers' Exchange wrote Drake for information about the merits of Eastern versus Western black walnuts. Later that fall, the Blodgett Nut Company of Fayetteville wrote to let Drake know that sample of his walnuts, fed to its power cracking machines, had yielded far more kernels per pound than the average shipment of nuts.
By December 1930, Drake anticipated a yield of 12-15 pounds, possibly 25 pounds, of "extra-fine kernels" from his walnut orchard. The term "depression" does not appear in correspondence sent to Drake until 1932.
In 1938, Drake received a request from the Tennessee Valley Authority for scion wood for grafting. His heirs continued to receive orders for scion wood after his death in 1945; the Texas Nursery Company of Sherman, Texas, cut 17,500 scions in 1947 and 22,000 in 1949, so descendants of Drake's trees are probably all over Texas.
. . .
A few weeks ago I heard from Neal Pendergraft, the dedicated conservationist whose family now owns Drake Farm; they have had every tree on the property inventoried.
The grove is beautiful. Apart from some 130 surviving walnuts, it holds massive pecans and prolific bois d'arcs. Crows pester hawks overhead. The place bears out the verse printed on the letterhead of Drake's correspondent John W. Hershey: "Lend a hand and plant a tree and future generations will bless thee."